Every family has their traditions and it’s those little rituals that create a lifetime worth of inside jokes and ultimately become the thread that binds the family together.   It is the way you “do” what you do that becomes your family tradition.  It doesn’t matter if your family likes to play scrabble, go hiking, eat cookies before dinner or sing out loud.  What matters is that your family establishes a regular time to have fun, enjoy one another’s company and create memories that will last a lifetime.

Around our house, a game of UNO has become our post-dinner time favorite and Friday night isn’t complete without StarWars The Clone Wars and a pack of Oreo Cookies. The two are so intertwined that I have, on more than one occasion, hopped out on Friday evening to make a special Oreo run.  It’s a silly little tradition but Friday night has become a special time because of it.

It’s the daily stuff we do, the small rituals that may not seem like much, that create the biggest bond.  In fact there are some very interesting facts when it comes to the family dinner.  And note, these stats have nothing to do with elaborate cooking and fine dining, it is just the simple act of sitting down on a regular basis to share a meal together.  According to a study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University:

• Children who have frequent family dinners (defined as 5 or more times a week) are less likely to use marijuana, tobacco and drink alcohol
• Girls who have five or more meals a week with their families are less likely to develop unhealthy eating habits
• By eating with your family it is more likely that meals will be healthier and well-balanced

For some families dinner time may be a challenge with schedules flying in every direction.  That is indeed true for us during soccer season. Fortunately, it doesn’t always have to be dinner. It just needs to be a little slice of time that you carve out on a very regular basis to spend time together and really listen to your kids.

Moms and families today are busy and stressed.  In fact there are a number of recent books populating bookshelves that reject the concept of an “ideal mother” and the “slow parenting” movement has become a new backlash to all the craziness.  Its premise is simple: slow down, unload the calendar, have more time to hang out together and live more in the moment.  Now doesn’t that sound like a good recipe for life?  I recently read a little fact you too may find surprising… Apparently Americans have quite a bit more leisure time than we did 40 years ago.  In fact, about 45 minutes a day of extra leisure time.  As Po Bronson said in the Time article How We Spend Our Leisure Time, “Then why does it feel like we have so much less?  It might be because we waste half of all our leisure time watching television. The average American adult devotes 2.5 hours a day to this hobby. And for every additional hour we get free, another 30 minutes goes into that boob tube.” That is sad, pathetically sad, but I’ll save that rant for another day.

So if you want more memorable family time, create fun little daily and weekly traditions and (with the exception of Star Wars the Clone Wars) turn off the TV.  You’ll enjoy the moment more and thank yourself in years to come.

By Dana Hilmer
Dana Hilmer is the founder of LifestyleMom, the host of the internet radio show The LifestyleMom Radio Café (LIVE Tuesdays at 10:00 AM PST on LATalkRadio.com) and the author of Blindsided by a Diaper: Over 30 Parents Reveal How Parenthood Changes a Relationship.